No, it wasn’t Suze with her wild eyes and embroidered nose who kept coming to the front of Chet’s mind. It was Stratton. What was so important that he had to come to meet an American businessman, rather than the Yank going to him? Why was he talking to the Grosvenor Group in some anonymous office and not in Number 10? And what did the Grosvenor Group have to do with it anyway?
Fuck it, Chet thought as he signalled to the bulldog for another pint of Stella. Not his business. As long as he kept pulling the pay cheques, the suits could discuss whatever the hell they wanted. Trouble was, after today’s bollocking he didn’t know how long the pay cheques would carry on coming.
At 22.30 he’d gathered up his rucksack of gear and staggered to the tube. Time to get his head down.
As he left Seven Sisters station, the cold was sobering. He walked as briskly as he could down the main road and into his little side street of terraced houses and maisonettes. The street lamps bathed the pavement in a yellow glow, but only a handful of houses had lights on in any windows. The booze and the darkness meant that he fumbled slightly as he unlocked his own front door. Once he was in, he slammed the door behind him and made his way in the darkness along the narrow hallway and towards the kitchen.
As he stood in the doorway of the kitchen he saw a red light flashing. The answer machine on the work surface, indicating a single message was waiting for him. His rucksack still slung over his back, Chet stomped into the kitchen and, still in darkness, pressed the play button.
He half expected it to be his amputee friend Doug, berating him. It wasn’t. A voice – female, posh and brisk – filled the kitchen. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Freeman. This is Angela Glover, Grosvenor Group human resources. I’ve been instructed to inform you that your services are no longer required by the gr . . .’
Angela Glover, whoever the hell she was, didn’t get to finish her message, because Chet had pulled the wires from the back of the answer machine and hurled it to the floor. The cheap plastic shattered against the floor, and Chet made to stamp on it with his good heel. ‘Fucking
bitch . . .
’
‘You should learn to calm you temper.’
Whoever had entered Chet’s kitchen behind him had done so in absolute silence. Chet felt the unmistakable sensation of cold metal against the back of his head.
He froze.
‘I’ll explain what’s going to happen.’ The intruder was female, her voice quiet and throaty, with an accent Chet couldn’t quite place – not American, exactly, but as though she’d learned English from a Yank.
‘You’re going to tell me the name of the woman you spoke to outside the meeting room today. If you do that, you might live to see morning.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Do you really need me to answer that?’
No, he thought. Not really . . .
Chet’s eyes were getting used to the dark, but he knew that in the absence of light his peripheral vision was the strongest. He used that now. To his left, within reach, was the half-eaten loaf of bread from that morning, with the kitchen knife lying to its side.
‘I didn’t speak to anyone,’ he said.
Get her talking, he figured. Then, when I make my move, she’ll be distracted.
No reply. Just the continued pressure of a weapon against the back of his skull.
‘Feel like telling me how you got into my flat?’
‘I feel like killing you. I’m going to count to five. If I don’t have a name by the end of it, that’s what I’ll do. One.’
He could grab the knife with his left hand. It wouldn’t take much to overpower this woman, whoever she was.
‘Two.’
His fingers twitched.
‘Thr . . .’
Chet yanked his head to the left just as he grabbed the knife and spun round. He didn’t fuck around with threats: he just sliced the blade into the back of the intruder’s gun hand. She cursed as the weapon fell to the floor, but used her good hand to swipe a blow at Chet.
It wasn’t just the force behind that blow that surprised him; it was the training too. The side of the intruder’s hand dug sharply into Chet’s neck, startling him momentarily and giving her the opportunity to raise her right leg and kick him hard in the stomach. Chet stumbled back, the wind knocked from him and his balance shaky. He saw the woman a metre in front of him, bending down to pick up the gun that she’d dropped, and he knew that he only had moments. This woman was a pro, no doubt about it, and she wasn’t going to give him a second chance.
He barged towards her, using all the strength in his good leg and the advantage of his greater bulk to knock her out of the way. She clattered against his rickety oven, and as she did so, he listened for the sound of the gun being knocked out of her hand again. He didn’t hear it, but she hissed something in a language Chet didn’t recognise: ‘
Harah!
’
And then there was a gunshot.
The weapon was suppressed, so the sound it made was just a dull thud. Chet saw a spark as the round left the barrel and he felt it whizz just inches from his hip before it thumped into the wall.
She could fire another round in seconds. Chet had to get out of there.
He didn’t give her time to re-aim, but burst out of the kitchen and hurtled back along the hallway, all traces of his previous inebriation a memory. When he got to the front door, he could hear the woman coming out of the kitchen. He could almost sense her raising the weapon again.
As he stepped over the threshold and pulled the door closed behind him, a second round splintered the wood from the inside. Chet limped down the pathway and round to the far side of his dented Mondeo, where he ducked out of sight.
He froze, his heart pumping furiously, and he listened carefully.
At first there was nothing. Then, after about ten seconds, footsteps. The shooter had turned left out of his house and was heading off down the street fast. Chet pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and entered. He threw the rucksack of gear on to the passenger seat, turned the key in the ignition and the engine jumped into life. The tyres screeched as he pulled out into the road and sped away. Chet glanced in the rear-view mirror as he accelerated. He could just see her, standing on the pavement, lit up by a street lamp, looking in his direction: black clothes, wavy black hair down below her shoulders, full lips, a beautiful, angry face.
And as Chet turned left out of his road, his mind was ablaze with questions. Who was she? How did she get into his flat? And why the
hell
had she just tried to kill him?
EIGHT
05.00 hrs.
Just under an hour till dawn. Luke and Finn could see the Bedouin village up ahead.
They’d approached slowly, keeping the engine noise to a minimum. In the distance they had seen the lights of what they assumed to be Iraqi border patrol vehicles. If they were discovered by one of these, things could get messy. But the desert was big and they were small. Nobody saw them.
Now they had left the car and were approaching on foot. They were on a dusty track that bore tyre marks but also animal footprints. On either side the terrain was dotted with boulders and low brush. Five minutes after they left the Toyota they passed a rusting car chassis. God knows how long it had been there. Years, probably.
Finn had changed out of his burka and into grubby gear
much like Luke’s. They had both used the cover of darkness to double-check the gear packed away in their ops waistcoats that were hidden under their
dishdashes
: magazines for their pistols, grenades, Plasticuffs. Their disco guns were fitted to their ankles, but their main weapons were closer at hand. They had each looped a piece of bungee cord in a figure of eight around the butt of their carbine, then threaded this around their arms so the weapon itself was hanging underneath their armpits – well disguised by the
dishdash
but accessible in a split second. With luck, they’d be in and out, but they didn’t know what was waiting for them up ahead, so they had to be prepared. And that meant packing some heavy shit.
Within ten minutes of leaving the car, they could see the outskirts of the village. They checked it out through the kite sight. It was a poor place – a seemingly random agglomeration of about twenty breeze-block houses, each a single storey high and with a shallow-sloping corrugated-iron roof. About 200 metres from the outermost of the houses was the shell of an older dwelling. The blockwork had crumbled, there was no roof and an old acacia tree, heavy under its own weight, had grown through one of the walls. Luke pointed at it. ‘We’ll set up an OP there,’ he said.
Finn nodded and together they headed for the derelict house. They were ten metres away when there was a sudden movement. Both men instinctively went for their weapons, only to see a beady-eyed goat scramble to its feet and put a few metres between itself and them. The bell round its neck gave a repeated dull clunk as it moved, and its breath steamed as it watched them make their way into the OP. The ground was covered with rubbish – old tins, rusting jerrycans and sturdy branches from the acacia tree. A gap in one wall where a window used to be formed a perfect place from which they could observe the village, and Finn took up position here. He pulled an A4 photograph and a pencil-thin red-filtered torch from under his robe. It was a satellite image of the tiny village. Each house was easily identifiable – there were twenty-two in total, and they were mostly set in a rough circle around a central courtyard – and one of them had been circled in black marker. This, if their intelligence was correct, was where they would find Abu Famir.
The two Regiment men examined the image together. Within seconds they had identified their OP, which was on the southern edge of the village, just east of the track leading into it. Their target location was on the north-eastern edge of the village, backed by an area of low brush and with a solitary tree growing about ten metres behind. Finn handed the photo to Luke, before bending down with his kite sight and scanning the darkness.
‘I’ve got eyes on,’ he said after a minute. He stood back so that Luke could have a look.
It took Luke about thirty seconds to take everything in. The central courtyard was about forty metres wide and littered here and there with large objects that were difficult to make out from this distance. The shell of another abandoned car? A collection of disused oil drums? Wandering around these objects were a number of animals – more goats, Luke assumed. The tree that they had noted on the satellite image was easy to make out; just beyond it Luke could see the target house. It was no different to any of the others: just a poor, blockwork dwelling with no windows and an iron roof.
Luke stepped back from the kite sight. ‘We wait till first light,’ he said. ‘Then we move in.’
Finn nodded, and went back to surveying the village through the kite sight.
Within less than twenty minutes the cold, grey light of dawn was starting to push back the inky night sky. Luke and Finn were ready. This was the best time to lift their target. It was dark enough to give them a bit of cover if they needed it, early enough for nobody to be about, and sufficiently late that any noise they made wouldn’t cause alarm. As they’d been waiting, a couple more goats had wandered up to the OP. That could be to their advantage. Luke selected a thin, sturdy acacia branch, about a metre long. If he could use that to guide a few goats into the village, they would look like Bedouin wanderers.
They stepped out from the OP. Three goats had congregated about ten metres away. Luke approached slowly, making a clicking sound in the corner of his mouth. One of the goats bolted, its bell jangling noisily as it disappeared into the night; but the remaining two lingered. The musty smell of the beasts and their shit reached Luke’s nose; when he tapped one of them firmly on its haunch, it made a shuddering sound. Another tap and both animals started wandering in the direction of the village.
A thick silence surrounded them – a silence in which the clanking of the goats’ bells and their own footsteps sounded deafening. Luke brandished his acacia branch firmly, but he also kept his left arm loosely by his side, ready to access his carbine. But at the moment there was nobody around. The goats in the central courtyard gazed at them curiously as the two SAS men stood at the edge of the settlement and looked in. The object Luke had seen through the kite sight was indeed the deserted chassis of an old car; and as they ventured further in, he could feel some residual warmth from the oil drums. Clearly someone had lit a fire in them the previous night.
Thirty metres to the target. Luke tapped one of the goats, and the men walked side by side past the oil drums and towards the building where they hoped to find Abu Famir.
From the corner of his eye, Luke sensed movement.
Somebody had appeared from one of the houses at their ten o’clock, no more than twenty metres away. Luke looked closely at the figure. It was a boy, no more than twelve years old, though his face already bore the ravages of a hard life. His body did too. The bottom half of his left leg was missing and he was able to stand only with the aid of a sturdy stick nestled under his left armpit. He wore a heavy cloth robe and a brightly coloured hat, and in his right hand he was carrying a metal bucket. He stared at the two strangers with wide eyes full of mistrust.